Valve today announced that Steam now supports mod creators selling mods via the workshop. My guess is the initial reaction of most will be “this sucks!”, but relax, this is going to be a good thing. Allow me to explain.
First, you aren’t forced to pay. No gun to your head here. It’s not even a case of “the devs shipped half the product and expect you to buy the DLC to finish it”.
Second, bad or broken mods will be outed quickly, because the internet today loves nothing more than taking up a random cause, especially if said random cause also cost them money. Maybe for once something actually positive will come from all those SJW out there.
Third, and best of all, great mods that really make the author(s) money will likely see greater support. If you are some part-timer with real skill and make some great mod that suddenly hits the big time, you are far more likely to put at least some of that money back into the mod than to keep your current pace, or step away. There are plenty of Skyrim or Mount and Blade mods I’d have paid for, and maybe had I been able to in the past those mods would be even better today :cough: unfinished Warhammer mod for M&B :cough:
So I’m all for this, because ultimately I think it will result in better gaming through better mods.
Hardcore Casual 
Seems like a great thing for the Indy devs making great mods. I wonder if Curse and Nexxus and other mod distributing sites will jump on the bandwagon? Regarding Skyrim I am not sure what makes Steam Workshop not preferable over a 3rd party site. For instance my favorite Skyrim mod is a total overhaul, but it has yet to be added to Steam Workshop, and the why sort of worries me.
I know initially Steam limited the size of mods, which is why a lot of Skyrim and M&B mods were not in the workshop. I believe that limit has been lifted now. Not sure if any other restrictions still exist.
For me the auto-updating feature alone is a huge plus for Steam over Nexus. The ability to browse the mods in the Steam UI is a nice plus too.
Got a 1 week alert violation from steam for putting this on comment on guys selling their mods, so if u tell em something they don’t like they silence you for 1 week
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Hehe yeah, it has to be the fact that you disagreed, not the way in which you did so :-P
Nice pic though :-)
There are actually a lot of arguements against this move on the Nexus forums. The foremost is what is Valves cut? 75% is being thrown around right now. That is fucking insane. Then there is the whole ‘Zynga’ effect of unscrupulous assholes that copy the really successful ideas. And further several mods rely on other mods to actually work (SKSE hello?). Interesting dominos effect going on here.
75% !? Holy crap.. I work in a business which involves linking up creative talent with customers. If we took a 75% cut.. well, let me just say I probably wouldn’t be working there any more, I’d have retired on my stock options by now.
75% sounds high, though I would expect that part of the “Steam cut” is then Valve giving some of that money to the devs of the game itself.
Lets say the devs get 50% (which would be fair IMO), Valve takes 25% (also fair), and the mod make gets the remaining 25%. I mean, without the devs there are no mods, and without Valve you can’t sell them. Even at 25%, if you make a hugely popular (say 500k downloads) Skyrim mod that sells for $5, that’s a nice little bit of income.
50% for Steam is still very high, they do nothing but hosting it. But the biggest problem right now is outright content theft. The moment this went live, people stole the mods from other sites, renamed them and cashed in on steam.
Knowing Steam´s horrible customer support, i can´t see them fixing this mess.
I agree with TotalBiscuit. The two major problems right are, first, this ridiculous 75% and, second, nothing is preventing people from taking good free mods out there and uploading them on Steam for money as if it is theirs.